One of the worst disasters in Brunswick history began on April 26, 1912, when the noon train of the Maine Central Rail Road pulled in on schedule. Suddenly, phones in Bath, Portland, Topsham and Lewiston began to ring off the hook; one caller crying out, “Brunswick is burning!”

Sparks from the noon train had set fire to tall, dry grass, and high winds from the south were “driving the flames” from the rail tracks “up toward Cabot Mill.” Business was “wholly suspended and crowds of citizens thronged the streets.”

The Maine Central Rail Road’s “engine house, round house, 70-foot-tall water tank, carpentry shop, warehouse,” located at Spring and Cedar streets, were quickly ablaze filling the sky with heavy smoke and flaming embers. The situation became even more dire when the fire spread to the nearby Knight and Standwood’s coal shed.

Flaming cinders fluttered down onto wooden roofs on Cedar Street, Union Street, Cumberland Street, Lincoln and Maine streets, and immediately set homes alight. The 100 men of the Brunswick Fire Department were quickly stretched to their breaking point.

Special trains were immediately dispatched from Bath, Lewiston and Portland. “Locomotive No. 221 loaded Bath Fire Department’s Steamer No. 3, Hose No. 2, and 20 men” onto a “flat car and box car … on Water Street” and hurried to Brunswick. In Lewiston, a train loaded another 20 men and their “steamer and hose wagon.”

By 3 p.m., as trains were unloading firemen and their equipment, “most of the population of Topsham had assembled in Brunswick. The Cabot Mill and Pejepscot Paper Company each called out their private firefighting apparatus.” From Brunswick’s population of 7,000, “hundreds of men and boys sprang to the aid of firemen,” as did “the whole student body from Bowdoin College.”

The path of the fire spread to “a distance one-half mile long and a quarter mile wide.” At one end, over “half a dozen dwelling houses on Cedar Street were ablaze.” On the other end, two stores on Maine Street had reportedly been damaged.

Flames were burning through the roof of “the doomed” St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, while an inferno was consuming the steeple atop St. John’s Catholic Church. Minutes later, the steeple came crashing down onto Pleasant Street in a fiery spectacle.

“The Union Street Primary School [was] burning,” as were another 50 buildings. It was clear to all that “not a single building was safe” from this fast-moving fire, and telephone lines were jammed with calls to newspapers — by citizens — offering minute-by-minute updates on the fire: One caller exclaimed, “The whole town is burning up!”

“People were climbing to the roofs and guarding their property with pails of water.” Students from Bowdoin College were placing “wet blankets” on rooftops and manning hose lines alongside firemen.

The Electric Light Company in Topsham cut power to the town and the pumping station directed nearly 1 million gallons of water into the mains and hydrants of Brunswick.

In Topsham, “several grass fires were lit from fiery cinders” as they came to rest in fields and wooded areas. Another woods fire ignited just off Maine Street, near the college, behind the home of recent victims of the Titanic sinking, Richard and Percival White.

By 7 p.m., “the all-out [was] sounded,” but the extensive damage to Brunswick was done. Flames had consumed much of the downtown residential area from Maine’s central tracks northward and was stopped at Cumberland Avenue.

“All of Cedar Street [was] swept clean. Not a house [was] left.” Homes and buildings on Dunning Street; Cumberland Avenue; Lincoln, Union, Elm, Pleasant and Middle streets had either been burned to ashes or sustained some damage.

The Hotel Eagle, located at Elm and Union, as well as the Memorial Library on Pleasant Street, had somehow survived the conflagration. Even the once “doomed” St. Paul’s Episcopal Church was saved and would be repaired. But St. John’s Catholic Church, “with one of the finest pipe organs in the state,” was “burned flat to the ground.”

Many injuries were reported, and “one girl and an infant were rescued on Cedar Street,” but — despite an early report to the contrary — no one was killed.

Immediate cleanup efforts began, and tradesmen were called to rebuild homes and businesses, and to repair what could be saved, while Brunswick’s leaders took steps to ensure this would not happen again.

The Town of Brunswick has known many “great fires” in its history, but this conflagration of April 1912 would be the last of Brunswick’s Great Fires.

Once again, the people of Brunswick had survived another remarkable disaster and they would again rebuild the town from its own ashes, fill the pages of Brunswick’s illustrious history, and augment the true and legendary tales of our Stories from Maine.

Lori-Suzanne Dell is a Brunswick author and historian. She has published four books and runs the “Stories from Maine” Facebook page.